"Vatican approval" of Gospel According to Judas?

Don't believe it for a moment! The media love to promote this sort of misinformation. "Pope gives blessing to gospel of Jeffrey Archer," shouts a headline by Richard Owen, Sarah Delaney and Ruth Gledhill (The Times, March 9, 2007). "The Gospel According to Judas is being launched at the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome" blares another, "with Vatican approval" and the "Church's overt backing," according to Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent of The Times, in "Archer, the story-teller, turns pen to Judas" (March 20, 2007), and "Jesus 'didn't walk on water or turn water into wine'" by Ruth Gledhill, on the TimesOnline Blog (March 20, 2007).

Here are the known facts: The Gospel According to Judas is a revisionist work of fiction that endeavors to exonerate Judas from being a traitor and "rehabilitate" him as a sympathetic figure and faithful disciple. Jeffrey Archer (pictured above left), who is co-author of the work, is the notorious author of best-sellers such as Kane and Abel, The Eleventh Commandment and prison diaries entitled Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, as well as a convicted perjurer and master makeover artist. As far as he's concerned, "Jesus never turned water into wine, He did not walk on the water and He never calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee." So how can a book like this garner the "Pope's blessing" and "Vatican approval"?

The short answer is that it cannot and has not. Then what is the basis for these claims? The answer is that there is none -- beyond certain personal Vatican connections of the other co-author, Professor Francis J. Moloney (pictured right). A Bible scholar, Moloney is head of the Salesian religious order in Australia, and has been a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission since 1984. But it gets better: he is a personal friend of the Pope. These connections have allowed Fr. Maloney to introduce their work as though it had the Vatican imprimatur as well as approval and official backing by the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.

Fr. Moloney is more cautious than his co-author about public image, especially where the Vatican is concerned. He publicly insists upon his faith in the resurrection, and told The Times that he considers Jesus to have been a "miracle worker." But even he is willing to state that his biblical studies have led him to "become convinced that some of Jesus's miracles were invented by the early Church." Ah, that good ol' time German "higher criticism" again! And there, you have it!

If this becomes any more of a public embarrassment for Rome, expect decisive backpedalling and nuanced "clarifications" from the Vatican public relations office.

Addendum:

In fact, here already is a response by Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., of the Pontifical Institute for Biblical Studies, posted this morning in the "Off the Record: Notes from the Newsroom" department of Catholic World News ("Remarks on the Gospel According to Judas"):

• The Pope did not "bless" the Archer-Moloney novel.
• The Pontifical Biblical Institute provided the bottled water at the speaker's rostrum for the Archer-Moloney press conference. Its scholars had nothing whatever to do with the book's content.
• The Archer-Moloney novel was not "published with Vatican approval."
• No biblical scholar, including my former colleague Fr. Frank Moloney, believes Fr. Frank Moloney to be "the world's greatest living biblical scholar."
• Fr. Moloney is not "one of the Pope's top theological advisers."
• The International Theological Commission, of which Fr. Moloney was a member, enjoys the same level of teaching authority as the Philatelic Office of the Holy See -- that's to say: zero.
• The teaching of the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum §11 has not been abrogated.

Fr. Mankowski's remarks are worth reading in their entirety, although they merely confirm that we have here, once again, as in the case of Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) and James Cameron (The Tomb of Jesus), another case of individuals angling to cash in on the growth industry of Bible deconstruction.

[Hat tips to Al Kimel for The Times and Ruth Gledhill blog links and to Jordan Potter for the Mankowski link.]